A Popular Victorian
FROM Addison's knowing whimsies to the accomplished impudence of a Winchell, is a far cry—two centuries and a half of Grub Street. Yet the tortuous road of journalistic history is cheered by few land- marks. Tom Paine at the end of the eighteenth century, Alfred Harmsworth at the beginning of the twentieth, and in between an inky waste, out of which rises the lonely, monstrous shape of George Augustus Sala.
The son of a dancing-master and a genteel singer, Sala began his career in the late 'forties, as illustrator and lithographer, largely specialising in " gothic " tales of horror. He was pricked by literary yearnings, tried his hand at a story or two which showed little promise, and dabbled unhappily in journalism. At one moment he was a scene-painter, at another he hawked the "Shaking Quaker's Herbal Pill " ; he dashed off panoramas of the Great Exhibition or of Wellington's funeral procession, and dreamed of finding fortune as an aeronaut.
Then, one night, he accidentally locked himself out of his rooms, and was compelled for some hours to wander the London streets. It was the beginning of his fortune. For the episode inspired him to write an article which caught the attention of Dickens, and was published by him in Household Words. The article made a sensation ; in a few years Sala, lithography forgotten, had become the best paid, and perhaps the best known, journalist in England.
His success was, we must suppose, natural, in a world where penny newspapers were still a novelty. He never attained the dis- tinction or power of a Delane ; his literary talents were of the slightest kind, and his taste, to say the least, was doubtful. But he was perfectly in tune with the new middle-class readers of the Victorian age. He took them into his confidence in a manner then original, he shared their jaunty enthusiasms ; did they want to know something of Hogarth, or Russia, or the Tichbourne Claimant? Sala was always at hand, to tell them just enough to satisfy, and not enough to frighten.
Moreover, he was a "character." The white waistcoat, the scarlet tie that was put into the shade by the bulbous flaming nose (a blow from the beringed fist of a Jew brothel-keeper in Panton Street had completed the ravage begun by drink) were known everywhere. The drinking bouts, when for weeks he could not write a line, the tempers, the boisterous good humour and generosity perpetuated in the public's mind a classic type of special correspondent, which to this day is one of Hollywood's stock characterisations.
Mr. Strauss's portrait of this extravagant figure is obviously a labour of love. To his task he has brought a scholarship which must excite grateful admiration. Nevertheless, when I first settled down to his 283 closely printed pages, I had some doubts whether Sala was a beguiling enough person to warrant so detailed a biography. Before I had reached the end, however, the book for
me at least, had utterly justified itself. To render Sala 'charming was obviously a task beyond even Mr. Strauss's power. Probably it was not his intention. But he has contrived to reproduce a cross- section of Victorian society with terrifying fidelity, to catch the odour of stale cabbage and mutton chops, of the dark green curtains tight drawn to shut out the 'prospect of children among the looms. To us the Victorian age must always remain, I suppose, remote and incomprehensible. But by delicately hinting at the depths to which English culture and wit had then fallen, by showing us the cosmopolitan Sala howling down a company of French players, or Dickens toning down an article of Sala's on the slums, so that no offence might be given, Mr. Strauss has enriched our understanding of that age, for whose foibles and complacency we are still paying.
SImON HARCoORT-SMITH.
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